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Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

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111–120 of 134 posts

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#111
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though, Modular should have been the team to do it. My theory is that they raised too much money too soon. With that kind of money, you get anxious investors waiting to see some magic on quarterly timelines. So Modular was forced to be compatible with Python as there's no other way to win quick developer mindshare. (Though I don't think they managed to do that either). A closest counter path I would have expected Mod…

> My theory is that they raised too much money too soon. That's also my feeling. And that's the curse of many VC funded companies. And they are not even in the classical state of enshitification yet . > Rust is not going to win this market. Agree. Rust will never win this market. Nor Zig, which has the same genetical flaws as C++ for accelerators (excessive usage of pointer semantics among others). > Julia, although…

I do not think Julia ever intended to be a Python clone. Julia was created in 2009 when Python was not as popular as today.

I think the statement is a strange one to make about a language that emerged from a PhD thesis. While one could say the objectives of Julia's design were academic (e.g. multiple dispatch) and more attention could have been paid to the practical application of the approach (e.g. where and how do we cache all this machine code we are generating), I find it incredulous to say a six year long PhD dissertation process was not a design phase.

The thesis in question can be found here: https://github.com/JeffBezanson/phdthesis/blob/master/main.p...

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#112
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"first principles" and "from scratch" are predictable failure modes... he had very good reason to pursue a Python-like language given the circumstances and objectives

I think I get what you mean and I should have been more precise in my wording. I didn't mean that an alien language that looks nothing like we have ever seen but for the sake of doing it "right" from scratch would have been a good idea. A new programming language definitely should steal the ideas of other languages that turned out to be good. But Mojo also adopted some of the arguably bad ideas from Python just becau…

> what kind of programming language would a person with as much experience and good taste as Chris Lattner come up with if there were no such external pressures?

Swift

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#113
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be reading this differently, but isn't the acquisition a bet that Modular will become a manufacturer-agnostic software stack? > "We believe the future belongs to developer-friendly, horizontal platforms that can run across diverse compute environments and give customers real choice in how and where they deploy AI," Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said.

I also believe this. And I think very few people can pull it off, and Chris Latt ner is precisely one of them. I hope that the agreement includes open sourcing Mojo at some point. Chris mentioned fall 2026, iirc.

Mojo compiler will be open in August.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualcomm has an enormous incentive in breaking Nvidia's CUDA grip on GPU programming.

Having Mojo support multiple platforms creates incentive to adopt Mojo and therefore write code in a language which can compile and run on Qualcomm hardware. This is good for Qualcomm. However the danger is that the language sees wide adoption but nobody uses it with Qualcomm hardware. Instead it might encourage people to buy AMD. This is a terrible outcome for Qualcomm. They paid to boost someone else's sales. So th…

I think a strategy for Qualcomm would be to use Mojo and Max as a software platform to drive AI inference on ARMv9 chips such as Snapdragon either at the edge (your smartphone) or in the cloud.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#115
post #55

Yesterday, LineShine a supercomputer in China emerges as #1 in the Top500 using ARM v9 based chips and no GPUs. Today, Qualcomm a premier designer of ARMv9 licensed chips in the United States acquires Modular, who has been creating a compiler stack that provides an alternative to NVIDIA's CUDA stack. Are you ready for Qualcomm ARMv9 powered inference running Mojo/MAX written kernels doing low-cost inference at scale…

Are you a bot?

No, of course not. I am totally not a bot. I just like to connect together unrelated events to see trends at scale.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also believe this. And I think very few people can pull it off, and Chris Latt ner is precisely one of them. I hope that the agreement includes open sourcing Mojo at some point. Chris mentioned fall 2026, iirc.

Mojo compiler will be open in August.

TODO: license-wash via LLM

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#117
post #55

Yesterday, LineShine a supercomputer in China emerges as #1 in the Top500 using ARM v9 based chips and no GPUs. Today, Qualcomm a premier designer of ARMv9 licensed chips in the United States acquires Modular, who has been creating a compiler stack that provides an alternative to NVIDIA's CUDA stack. Are you ready for Qualcomm ARMv9 powered inference running Mojo/MAX written kernels doing low-cost inference at scale…

Are you a bot?

Mark (=the person you replied to) has appeared in conferences.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#118

Modular now joins SYCL, OpenCL, and One API on the list of cross platform languages which never really became cross platform. After so long and so much investment in AI, the best cross-platorm API we've got for high performance Kernels is vulcan, a graphics API. That is sad. Still, this is pretty good for Modular's employees, probably good for Qualcomm. It's just terribly disappointing for anyone who invested time le…

> After so long and so much investment in AI, the best cross-platorm API we've got for high performance Kernels is vulcan, a graphics API. That is sad.

Vulkan is mighty fine, but Julia just works for me.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#119
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Julia and the Python JITs from GPU vendors will. Mojo already lost the moment AMD, NVIDIA and Intel decided to fully support Python and Julia. Additionally all of the parallel programming improvements in ISO C++ are coming from them as well, Modular did not have much moat when being a follower and not a driver.

How did Mojo already lose when Qualcomm just made a $4B bet on it? You're forgetting that the language is still pre-1.0. The way I think of this... if Modular is able to remain an open platform, being part of an established corporation with existing customers is a better way to drive penetration compared to acquiring new customers.

> How did Mojo already lose when Qualcomm just made a $4B bet on it?

NVDA market cap is $4.7T.

The difference between a billion and a trillion is roughly a trillion.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really sure if Mojo has lost or not, but the community has felt quite different than other language communities I have encountered. The development feels less organic and more driven by venture capital. This is most acutely felt in the current closed source development of mojo itself, which seems like it will continue into the near future. I look forward to seeing open source mojo and the community that will…

> The development feels less organic and more driven by venture capital The development has been driven by the needs of Modular. > This is most acutely felt in the current closed source development of mojo itself Mojo compiler is closed, the language development is quite open. Some of the proposed changes have been shelved or tweaked based on community feedback. However, you should understand that the compiler is clo…

> I have zero doubt it'll reach mainstream adoption

Be careful. I said this 10 years ago about OpenCL, and I've ate crow ever since.

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